My favourite book is french and obviously not traducted in english, so i would have to settle for Bug Jack Barron, by Spinrad.

There is a twist, and then, there are many others . You can feel the characters falling apart, as the story goes, it is awsome !

(If someone speaks french, i do recomend La Horde du contrevent, which means "The Horde of the counterwind", it is a story about 20 people in an inclined world where the wind comes downhill who try to get to the origin of this never stoping wind) .

Either Timequake by Vonnegut or The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald for fiction.

The Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu for nonfiction

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. -Kurt Vonnegut

I think the Darkwar trilogy from Glen Cook fits the bill. The characters aren't anything special as far as his writing goes, and the setting isn't anything extraordinary, but the scope... the scope is amazing. You go from reading about a girl growing up as part of a tribe that's just barely, barely escaped the pure hunter-gatherer stage into very rudimentary agriculture, and by the end of the series you're reading about this same girl now a grown, mature woman flying around in space and meeting aliens.

I don't know. I'd give the trilogy as a whole less than an 8, and yet I still think it's an incredible series of books... despite flaws here and there, it's just incredible.

For a single book? Probably Passage at Arms, also by Glen Cook. Think submarines, but in space. The enemies, the protagonists, the narrator... they're all left intentionally vague (almost in the way Orwell leaves the warring armies vague in 1984), fleshed out almost through inference and implication instead of just coming out and saying it. It's about the tension the men in the ship feel as they're sent out to fight an enemy they don't even really know much about, against impossible odds, and yet it does it without trying to make them into heroes - they're just one of many crews doing the same damn thing.

There are a couple of very great ones. Hyperion by Dan Simmons. 1984 by Orwell. Rendevouz with Rama from Arthur C. Clarke (like 2001). Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keye. They all approach perfection. And yes, I do like science fiction.

sdaddy wrote:There are a couple of very great ones. Hyperion by Dan Simmons. 1984 by Orwell. Rendevouz with Rama from Arthur C. Clarke (like 2001). Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keye. They all approach perfection. And yes, I do like science fiction.

Hard sci-fi? I picked up a little anthology book called Engineering Infinity a few months back and ended up liking some of the short stories there. I've since been discovering that I not only like short stories, books like Engineering Infinity are also a great way of "discovering" new authors.

no-genius Oct, 2007 wrote:I've said this before, but Hitchhikers....Of the books I read recently, it would have to be VALIS by Philip K Dick.

Nearly 4 years later (which justifies an update), it's probably Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, who is my favourite author at this point.* So good that when I got to reading the last chapter** I had to stop myself from re-reading the whole thing*** .

* also read (in order) Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Girl With Curious Hair, The Pale King, Oblivion:Stories, currently reading Consider The Lobster and haven't read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (might give The Broom Of The System a miss).**

Spoiler:

(chronologically last, but book-wise I was reading the first chaper again)

*** which I think I will at some point, which I can't say for other doorstoppers like the Illuminatus! trilogy and Crytonomicon, although I might re-read Gravity's Rainbow, and I've read House of Leaves about 2 3/4 times.

This is a very hard question, as it seems to depend on my mood and some books are just very hard to compare to others, so I will list a few:

1984The Hunger Games Trilogy (just finished last night...dear god, it was amazing)The Kingkiller Chronicles (Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear) -- two VERY amazing books, and I can't wait for the third to come out.Perks of Being a Wall FlowerChildhoods End

And sooo many more I enjoyed...but those are probably the ones that had the most meaning to me overall.

Cryptonomicon (followed closely behind by The Diamond Age in the Stephenson pantheon)The Cyberiad (all of Stanislaw Lem's books are sadly not well-known enough though)The Player of Games (not the 'best' Culture novel but the most readable)The Bridge (fantastic Iain Banks non-SF book)

Ohh... it's not originally, but #1 is - Lord Of The Rings. I read it in Russian and in original language. I cannot explain in English, how i love LOTR. It's never get boring, always reader is in a state of motion by Middle-earth. When you imagine all these creatures and if you imagine it farther and farther... Ah! It does not describe with words! :3

However, even if the LOTR is the best book - we can't stop reading other books. Last time i read some books of Haruki Murakami. Might be there is a lot of perversions, but it is very sentimentally and i sometimes cry.

Once in my childhood i was reading A. Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo and The Tree Musketeers. It was great! Alexandre Dumas makes reader to turn over page after page.

The god father and Gone with the wind is my most favourite book. I love characters with all their life. They are so strong.Besides, Pricess Diary by Megg Cabot is also my liking. It's very funny. Micheal is so grreat! :X

I have always totally adored A Little Princess-- one of those books that for various reasons just stuck with me my entire life. It's sort of typical, I suppose, but as an avid reader as a kid that was the one book I wore to death reading over and over again.

I also really loved the Harper series from the Pern world-- I read the first of Mennolly's in the back of one of my literature books when I was younger and it stayed with me until I found the rest of the series at my library and devoured up until the White Dragon.

I guess I'd say Katharine Kerr's Snare. It's fairly obscure, even for her, but I love it and would really recommend it if you're interested in sci-fi fantasy with shockingly great female and poc characters. Maybe if I reread it I could find some things questionable about it, but I really just build an intense fondness for any sci-fi fantasy that handles racial and gender themes well.

A Song of Ice and Fire, specifically the first book. Wow, what a refreshing read, especially if you deliberately avoided reading about it beforehand and how it killed just about any cliche. When

Spoiler:

Ned was beheaded at the end of book 1, I was completely shocked. I went through the index of book 2 because I didn't believe he actually died. Best plot twist ever!

.

I also loved the intrigant wars, and how GRRM managed to turn your view of characters completely around without actuall changing them or popping out DEM, and how no character is really good or bad. Best examples:

Spoiler:

1. How Ned is, at the start when you're still expecting the cliched hero, all righteous and good, but actually, he isn't. His righteousness is obviously somehow more worth than the lives of all the people in Westeros.

2. How Jaime is this incestous bastard who would kill a child without remorse, and seems to not have any kind of honor - but actually, he saved half a million people's lives by killing the king and is basically hated by everyone for it. Worst thing, most of the self-absorbed lawful types would have let those people die in agony to not break their vow.

3. Tyrion. Magnificient bastard.

When I read it all these years ago, the series basically killed 95% of well-received books on the market for me because they can't compare. I also really like that he's not about the big battles and whatnot (there's much of that out there already), but the politics.

These days I think it sits firmly tied between "The Great Gatsby" and "Timequake".

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. -Kurt Vonnegut